title: Number dissimilarities facilitate the comprehension of relative clauses in children with (Grammatical) Specific Language Impairment.
abstract: This study investigates whether number dissimilarities on subject and object DPs facilitate the comprehension of subject- and object-extracted centre-embedded relative clauses in children with Grammatical Specific Language Impairment (G-SLI). We compared the performance of a group of English-speaking children with G-SLI (mean age: 12;11) with that of two groups of younger typically developing (TD) children, matched on grammar and receptive vocabulary, respectively. All groups were more accurate on subject-extracted relative clauses than object-extracted ones and, crucially, they all showed greater accuracy for sentences with dissimilar number features (i.e., one singular, one plural) on the head noun and the embedded DP. These findings are interpreted in the light of current psycholinguistic models of sentence comprehension in TD children and provide further insight into the linguistic nature of G-SLI.
authors.affiliation: Department of Linguistics,University of Potsdam.
authors.forename: Flavia
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Adani
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology,University of Milano-Bicocca.
authors.forename: Matteo
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Forgiarini
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology,University of Milano-Bicocca.
authors.forename: Maria Teresa
authors.initials: MT
authors.lastname: Guasti
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology,Harvard University and Psychological Sciences Research Institute,Université Catholique de Louvain.
authors.forename: Heather K J
authors.initials: HK
authors.lastname: VAN DER Lely
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D002648:Child; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007805:Language Development Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000628:therapy*; D007807:Language Tests; D007808:Language Therapy; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D012660:Semantics; D013067:Speech Perception; D014825:Vocabulary